“Intellectual History for What?

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U.S. Intellectual History Conference 2010

Rochelle Gurstein
Independent Scholar

Our panel poses the question, "Intellectual History for What?" The first thing that
comes to my mind is intellectual history for the purpose of situating ourselves, for un-
derstanding how we have gotten to where we are in our public disputes about political
and cultural matters but also, on a more personal level, how we have come to inhabit
what we normally think of as our own private thoughts, feelings, perceptions, taste, sen-
sibility. I can still remember what a revelation it was to me to read Christopher Lasch's
Culture of Narcissism. I was in my early twenties, recently out of college, casting about
for something to do with my life—something meaningful is how I would have put it at
the time. I had studied English and had literary aspirations—serious ones at that—but
no sense of how to proceed, certainly not of how to make anything resembling a living as
a writer. A friend of mine was studying to be a psychoanalyst and was a member of a
psychoanalytic book club. The pick of the month was The Culture of Narcissism (such
was the book's fame in the early '80s); he received two copies by mistake and gave me
the extra one. It was like no book either of us had ever read, extremely compelling but
difficult, so difficult that we met every few days, book and notes in hand, to discuss it.

I say that reading The Culture of Narcissism was a revelation to me, by which I mean I
discovered that my feelings of emptiness and futility were not just due to my own per-
sonal psychological failings; I came to understand that they were also the consequence
of a larger history that produced the alienating circumstances in which I found myself—
violently contested developments, it turned out, that transformed America from a local-
ized society of independent, self-reliant farmers, artisans, merchants, and entrepreneurs
into a mass society of large-scale production, consumption, bureaucracy, and political
centralization, administered in every detail by a new class of professionals and manag-
ers. Reading Lasch I got a glimpse of where people used to find meaning—in dignified,
stimulating, useful work; in voluntary civic or community associations where one could
participate in projects greater than the self; in a flourishing home life with extended
family and friends and neighbors. I can remember thinking at the time—and this im-
pression has only grown stronger since—that for most people, meaningful work, civic
life, not to mention enduring personal relations were hard to come by. I very much
wanted to know more about why and how this happened. It mattered to me as an ur-
gent existential question. I went to Rochester to study with Lasch.

Over the course of my graduate studies I learned in far greater detail about the fateful
historical developments that transformed America from a producer society to our pre-
sent consumer and narcissistic one. In classes with Lasch, I began to see how intellec-
tual history could recover long forgotten or wrongly discredited arguments and ways of
life that were critical of and provided alternatives to monopoly capitalism, the central-
ized state, and the culture of consumption. From Lasch, I learned the importance of ex-
ercising one's historical imagination so as to sympathetically yet critically enter the

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thoughts and sensibilities of people living in the past. From J. G. A. Pocock, whose work
and extraordinary erudition I also came to admire, I learned the importance of master-
ing the languages of the past as best as one could so as to be able to recognize what could
be thought and felt at a particular time and place, what was a convention and what
might be considered that truly rare event in the history of ideas—an innovation. And
from Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work, especially After Virtue, also saved me from a life
of existential despair, I learned the importance of attending to how traditions and prac-
tices change over time, in particular, how they can become internally exhausted, even
dessicated, or how they can be successfully challenged by opponents; how they can come
to a final end or, alternatively, how they can be reinvigorated, either from within or from
without, and gain a new lease on life.

These three distinct yet related approaches to intellectual history are what have guided
me in my own work. I wrote a history of what happened to privacy in the modern age,
The Repeal of Reticence, in order to better understand how we have come to inhabit a
world that feels so shameless. For a number of years I have been writing a history of
what happened to the idea of standards, what I am tentatively calling Of Time and
Beauty, in order to understand how the contemporary art world—and our larger culture
as a whole—has come to feel so unbearably weightless and sensational. And more re-
cently, I have been writing a monthly column on how the world looks and feels to me, an
intellectual historian, for the New Republic On-line. In reviewing my own rather hap-
hazard career, it seems to me that reading and writing intellectual history has helped me
(and I imagine others) to escape the confines of my own inner life and the provinciality
of our own historical moment; it has provided much-needed light into how and why our
current public disputes have taken what is usually an intractible form; what is more, it
can bring into view traditions and practices, ideas and sensibilities, that have been rele-
gated to the obscurity of the losing side of history but still have vitally important things
to offer us, if only we can be made sensitive or alert or open-minded or expansive
enough to recognize them.

Perhaps this sounds grandiose, perhaps foolhardy. I know it does not sound like intel-
lectual history as it is usually conceived, taught, and practiced within the Academy.
Which brings me to a question related to "intellectual history for what?" and that is, "in-
tellectual history for whom?" which is raised by the theme of this conference, "Intellec-
tuals and their Publics." I have to say that the word "publics," plural, does not resonate
with me, for I understand public to mean a common realm, a shared space, singular
even as it is made up of the many. I am not sure what is gained by conceiving of the
public as particular niches, except perhaps to acknowledge that few of us who write in-
tellectual history today have a clear sense of our public or even if there is a public—what
I have in mind here is serious, engaged readers—for our labors.

But then again concern over the existence of a serious, engaged reading public has long
troubled serious, engaged writers. In 1909, Herbert Croly was already voicing this con-
cern in The Promise of American Life, a book, as I am sure you know, that would exert
enormous influence over the Progressive movement. In its closing pages—and I realize
that it is only to these pages that I ever return—Croly no doubt was speaking as much to
himself (at the time he was an editor and writer for The Architectural Record) as to

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skeptical or dispirited readers when he declared, "In so far as a public is lacking, a public
must be created." [444] How to do so? Croly gave the example of "the exceptional ar-
chitect who insists upon doing his very best," a man, as he put it, who "has a monopoly
of his own peculiar qualities." He pointed out that "such merit may not be noticed by
many people; but it will probably be noticed by a few. The few who are attracted will re-
ceive a more than usually vivid impression. They will talk and begin to create a little
current of public opinion favorable to the designer." [445]

In his discussion of creating a public, Croly was especially interested in the intensity of
the audience's response to the integrity and force of an exceptional practitioner's vision,
what used to be called influence. This view, of course, could not be further away from
today's notion of influence as an instant popularity contest in which numbers of so-
called "hits" determine which article is "posted" as "most viewed" or "most emailed" on
any On-Line site. Numbers meant next to nothing to Croly, who instead saw and appre-
ciated the disproportionate influence a truly exceptional architect—and he says that this
is also true of the exceptional statesman, man of letters, philanthropist, and reformer—
can exert on the public, in particular, the way such a person "molds and informs the ar-
chitectural taste and preferences of his admirers" as well as his peers by providing more
and more examples of distinctive works that never compromise his own standards.
"The effect of his work," Croly concluded, "will soon extend beyond the sphere of his
own personal clientele. In so far as he has succeeded in popularizing a better quality of
architectural work, he would be by way of strengthening the hands of all his associates
who were standing for similar ideals and methods." [445]

Whenever I despair of the idea of a serious, engaged public, I think of what Dwight
Macdonald once said along these same lines about his own experience of running a little
magazine, Politics, (forty-two issues that he brought out often singlehandedly from 1944
to 1949). At no point did the magazine ever reach more than a few thousand readers,
but, as Macdonald tells the story in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957), he came to real-
ize from chance encounters with "nostalgic old readers" in "unexpected quarters" that
he was better known for Politics than for his articles for The New Yorker, even though
the circulation of The New Yorker was roughly seventy times greater. [27] I also re-
member that five years after The Promise of American Life appeared, so did a new
magazine, The New Republic, with Herbert Croly at the helm.

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